Tag Archives: Creepy

One of my favourite Japanese directors, KUROSAWA Kiyoshi has made one of the most significant contributions to Japanese horror cinema starting with Sweet Home (1989) – which is well worth watching if you can track down a copy – and most recently with Creepy/Kuripi Itsuwari No Rinjin, based upon the novel by Yutaka Maekawa. His 2001 techno-horror Pulse/Kairo is one of the most haunting, evocative explorations of the alienated state of late capitalism: people disappear leaving just burnt ashes in their wake, signifiers of the fragile nature of existence and the processes of personal and historical amnesia. Creepy explores psychological rather than supernatural horror: here the monster – that which disrupts the narrative and needs to be removed in order for order to be restored – could be anyone/is everyone.

Creepy takes place in a seemingly normal neighbourhood where a retired policeman, Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) lives with his wife, Yasuko (Yuko Takechi) after retiring from the police force after a confrontation with a particularly brutal serial killer, changes his world forever. On the surface the neighbourhood seems idyllic, yet the neighbours are less than welcoming and Yasuko is increasingly isolated while Takakura becomes distracted looking into an old case where a family went missing in a neighbourhood similar to theirs, leaving behind their youngest daughter, Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi). Meanwhile the strange neighbour who lives next door, Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa) who has a sick wife and teenage daughter, latches onto Yasuko’s loneliness and a strange, creepy relationship develops between them.

Unlike the phantasmagoric threats of his earlier films, here the threat is other people, particularly those living in close contact. In a sense, this makes Creepy more frightening than his supernatural horror films. How well do we know our neighbours when the concept of a community has been fractured and fragmented by our modern lifestyles in which technology has become a replacement for connection and personal communication? While Takakura begins to realise that the neighbourhood that the Honda family lived in ‘looks like a crime scene’, he fails to recognise that it is in fact a mirror image of his, and that in fact from a distance the two neighbourhoods including the placement of the houses are exactly the same. The slow build-up to the eventual dénouement is creepy, as in the title of the film, and as past and present convalesce in a shocking final 30 minutes and a refusal to offer the review a neat resolution: the circularity of time and double structure which brings together different and disparate temporalities* articulates Kurosawa’s mediation of the nature of time, memory and the past which unifies his work, whether ‘horror’ or ‘not’.

Creepy, has been, unfairly in my opinion, compared to his other films and seen as lacking as a result. I would argue that Creepy is one of the most accomplished films that Kurosawa has directed: I found it genuinely frightening and horrific and compulsive viewing. I would highly recommend seeing it. Creepy is on at the moment and will have its premiere at the London Film Festival: details available here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff.

Full Screening Dates in the UK are as below and are reproduced from Eureka’s website: